THE RANCH ON BIG LITTLE RIVER
Buck Thornton had returned to the Poison Hole ranch. But first he had
ridden from the Smith place down the trail to Harte's, where he made
swift, careful search for some sign to tell him who was the man who had
lamed his horse maliciously and seemingly with no purpose to be gained.
Further, he had sought for tracks to tell him from where this man had
come, where he had gone. When he had found nothing he went, he hardly
knew why, to the cabin, pushed the door open and entered. And instead of
learning anything definitely now he was merely the more perplexed. By
the fireplace lay a chair, overturned. There had been some sort of
hurried movement here, perhaps a struggle. The table had been pushed to
one side, one leg catching in the rag rug and rumpling it. He struck a
match, lighted the lamp and sought for some explanation. When had this
struggle, if struggle there had been, occurred? It must have been after
he and Miss Waverly had set out on the trail to Smith's, he told himself
positively. Then there had been two people here in the meantime, for it
takes two people to make a tussel. And they had gone. Who could it be?
Was he after all to find a clue to the man who had maimed his horse?
Looking about him curiously it chanced that he found something that
drove a puzzled frown into his eyes. It had caught in the frayed edge of
the rug, and to have been so caught and so left meant that it had been
done during the struggle he had already pictured. He took it up into his
hand, trying to understand. For it was the rowel of a spur, a tiny,
sharp, shining rowel that had come loose from a spur he remembered very
well. And he remembered, too, that Winifred Waverly had had her spurs on
when she came out to him at the barn!
"It happened while I was out after the horses!" He sat down, the shining
spiked wheel lying in the palm of his hand, his brows drawn heavily.
"While I was out there ... it happened. Some jasper came in here, there
was some sort of a tussle ... and she didn't say a damned word about
it!"
Yes, he was certain now that something had happened during the brief
time between his going out for the horses and the girl's coming to him
at the barn. Something that had changed her, that had killed her
friendliness toward him, that had made her cold and cruelly different.
"The same man who slipped his knife across my horse's foot came in here
and saw her while I was out for the horses," he said slowly. "The same
man. It must have been. And she could tell me who it was and she
didn't. Why? After they had struggled here, too! Why?"
He could see no reason in it all, no reason for her silence, no reason
for a man's malicious cruelty to a horse. Nor were these the only things
which he could not understand. Groping for the truth, he began carefully
to run over the things which had seemed strange to him and which now
struck him as being connected in some plan darkly hidden.
The girl was Henry Pollard's niece. He began with that fact. She was on
her way to Pollard's and on an errand which the banker Templeton had
called mad and dangerous. Some man had followed her, a man whom she had
twice seen on the trail and whose outfit resembled Thornton's, resembled
it too closely to be the result of chance! The same headstall with the
red tassel, the same grey neck-handkerchief, a sorrel horse....
"By God!" whispered the cowboy, a sudden light in his eyes, "he lamed my
horse so it would limp the same as his! So she'd be sure she had seen me
on the trail behind her! And when she came out and saw my horse limping
she knew I had lied to her!"
But why? Why? What lay back of all this?
In the end he put out the light, slipped the spur rowel into his vest
pocket, and went out to his horse. Then when an hour's search brought
him no nearer to the hidden truth for which he was groping, he gave up
trying to pick up this other man's trail in the rocky soil about
Harte's place and turned back toward the south-east and his own ranch.
"I'm going to have a talk with you, Miss Grey Eyes," he said softly.
"I've got to give you back your spur, and I'm going to ask you some
questions."
He rode late into the night, stopped for a few hours under the stars
with saddle blanket for bed, and in the dawn pushed on again.
For the few days which followed he had, in the stress of range work,
little time for thought of the riddle which had been set for him to
solve, and when he had time after the day's work he was tired and ready
for sleep. He was working short handed now for the very simple and not
uncommon reason that he was spending no dollar which he did not have to
spend. The payments he had already made to Pollard had been heavy for
him, and there was yet another five thousand dollars to be forthcoming
in six months. The contract was clear upon the point, and he knew that
if he failed to meet his obligation Henry Pollard would be vastly
pleased, being in a position to keep the fifteen thousand which had been
paid to him and to get his range back to boot.
Perhaps because Henry Pollard had never lived upon the ranch during the
twenty years he had owned it improvements were few and poor. There was
the barn, too small now, which must come down in another year; there was
the old corral which was little used since Thornton had had the newer,
bigger one builded. Then, for ranch house, there was a single room
cabin, its walls of heavy logs from the hills at the head of the Big
Little River, its door of great thick planks rough and nail studded, its
roof of shakes. A hundred yards from it, at the foot of the knoll upon
which the ranch house stood, was a similar cabin, a dozen feet longer,
serving as the men's bunk house.
Big Little River wound about the foot of the knoll, separating
Thornton's cabin from the bunk house, three or four feet deep here and
spanned by a crude footbridge. In its windings it made a sort of
horseshoe about the knoll so that looking out from the door of the
cattle man's cabin one saw the sluggish water to east, west and north.
Upon the third morning after his return to the range Thornton rose
early, scowled sleepily at the little alarm clock whose strident clamour
had startled him out of his sleep at four o'clock, kicked off his
pajamas and with towel in hand started down to the river for his morning
plunge. Subconsciously he noted a scrap of white paper lying upon the
hewn log which served as doorstep, but he paid no heed to it. He had his
dip, diving from the big rock from which most mornings of the year he
dived into the deepest part of the stream; and in a little came back
through the brightening daylight rosy and tingling and with the last
webs of sleep washed out of his brain. Again he noted the paper; this
time he stooped and caught it up. For now he saw that it was folded,
carefully placed where he must see it, pinned down with a sharp pointed
horseshoe nail.
"Now who's sending me letters this way?" he demanded of himself.
And he flushed a little and called himself a fool because he knew that
he half expected to find that it was a note from a certain girl with
unforgettable grey eyes. But before he had read the few words, as soon
in fact as his eyes had fallen upon the uneven, laboriously constructed
letters of the lead-pencilled scrawl, he knew that this did not come
from her hand. The signature puzzled him; it consisted of two letters,
initials evidently, a very large j, not capitalized, followed by a very
small capital C.
"Now, who's J.C.?" he muttered. "I can call to mind no J.C. who would be
writing me letters!"
As he read the note a look of astonishment came into his eyes. It ran:
"Deer buck, I am shure up against hard luck. Dont know nobody but you
can give me a hand remember that time down in El paso I was yore freind.
Come to old shack by Poison hole tonight & dont tell nobody & bring sum
grub Buck remember El paso.
"j.c.
"p.s. I was yore freind buck."
Thornton remembered. He went slowly about his dressing, turning again
and again to look at the note he had placed upon his little pine table.
That had been five years ago. He was riding between Juarez and El Paso,
having just sold a herd of steers from the range he had owned in Texas
then. He had been detained in the Mexican town until after dark, and
before its lights had ceased winking behind him he had known that though
his precaution of taking a check instead of gold had saved his money to
him it had not saved him from coming very close to death. There were
still three scars, two in the shoulder, one in the right side, to show
where the bullets had bitten deep into him, from behind. He had been
searched swiftly, roughly, his clothing torn by the hurried fingers of
the man who had shot him.
It had been close to midnight when his consciousness came back to him. A
little man, hard featured but gentle fingered, was working over him. It
was Jimmie Clayton. And Clayton had found the crumpled check in the
darkness, had gotten the wounded man on his own horse, had taken him to
El Paso, and finally had saved his life, nursing him, working over him
day and night for the two weeks in which his life was in danger.
Since then Thornton had seen little of Clayton. He had known even at the
time of the shooting that the man was as hard a character as his
close-set, little eyes and weasel face bespoke him; he had come to know
him as an insatiate gambler, the pitiful sort of gambler who is too much
of a drunkard to be more than his opponent's dupe at cards. He had found
him to be a brawler and very much of a ruffian. But though he did not
close his eyes to these things they did not matter to him. For
gratitude and a sense of loyalty were two of the strong silver threads
that went to make up the mesh of Buck Thornton's nature, and it was
enough to him that little Jimmie Clayton had played the part of friend
in a town where friends were scarce and at a time when but for a friend
he would have died.
It was not alone the fact of Clayton's turning up here and now that
surprised the cattle man; it was the fact of his turning up anywhere.
For he had thought that Clayton, weak natured and so very often the
other man's tool, was serving time in the Texas penitentiary. For, three
years ago, rumour had brought to him word of a sheriff's clean-up, and
the names of three men who had been working a crude confidence game,
bold rather than shrewd, and Jimmie Clayton's name was one of the three.
He had heard only after the men had been convicted and sentenced for
five years apiece, and had at the time regretted that he could not have
known sooner so that in some way he might have returned the favour he
had never forgotten.
At last having dressed, he shoved the letter into his pocket, and went
down to the bunk house for breakfast. To the cook and to the three men
already at the table he had little to say, so full were his thoughts of
Jimmie Clayton. He was wondering what "hard luck" the little fellow had
run up against, why he was hiding out at a place like the Poison Hole
shack, how he had gotten the letter to the range cabin, and, if he had
brought it himself, why he had not made himself known last night.
He gave his few, succinct orders for the day, made his hurried meal,
and went to the corral for his horse. And all that day he rode hard out
in the broken country where the eastern end of the range ran up and back
into the gorges of the mountains, shifting herd, collecting stragglers,
bringing them down into the meadow lands where the feed was abundant now
that he had sold the cattle he had had ranging there in order that he
might raise the money to make up the five thousand dollars for Henry
Pollard.
As he rode he spoke seldom to the horse running under him or to the boys
with whom he worked, his thoughts flying now to another horse, lamed
from a knife cut, now to a girl whose spur rowel he carried in his vest
pocket, now to a man whose appealing letter he carried in another
pocket. And he was glad when the day was done and the boys raced away
through the dusk to their supper.
Not infrequently did he ride on after he had told the others to "knock
off," working himself harder than he could ask them to work, riding late
to look at the water holes or find a new pasture in some of the little
mountain valleys or to bring in a fresh string of saddle horses for the
morrow's riding. So now, as darkness gathered, he watched the boys
scamper away to their food and smoke and bunks, and rode on slowly
toward the north.
He chose this time, the thickening darkness before moonrise, for he had
caught the insistent plea for secrecy running through the lines of the
letter. And so, though he was not a little impatient and curious, he let
his tired horse choose its own loitering gait, willing that the night
draw down blacker about him.
He crossed the Big Flat, rich grassy land watered by the Big Little
River, and struck off into the hills that closed in about it, following
the river trail. It was very still, with no sound save the swish of the
water against the willows drooping downward from its banks, no light
save the dim glimmer of the early stars. For two miles he followed the
stream, then left it for a short cut over the ridge, to pick it up again
upon the farther side. Now he was in a tiny valley with the mountains
close to the spot which gave its name to the range.
Big Little River writhed in from the east, twisted out to the south. And
in the shut-in valley it made and left behind it to all but cover the
entire floor of the valley a lakelet of very clear water not over a
quarter of a mile from edge to edge, but very deep. Upon the far side, a
little back and close under the overhanging cliffs, there was a great,
jagged-mouthed, yawning hole, of a type not uncommon in this part of the
western country, from which heavy, noxious gases drifted sometimes when
the wind caught them up, gases which for the most part thickened and
made deadly the dark interior. There were skeletons to be seen dimly by
daylight down there, ten feet below the surface of the uneven ground,
the vaguely phosphorescent bones of jack rabbits that had fallen into
this natural trap, of coyotes, even of a young cow that had been
overpowered before it could struggle upward along the steep sides. And
the odour clinging to the mouth of the hole was indescribably foul and
sickening.
Not a pretty place, and yet some man many years ago had builded him a
habitation here that was half dugout, half log lean-to. The door of the
place faced Poison Hole, and was not two hundred yards from it. The
hovel had been in disuse long before Buck Thornton came to the range
save as a shelter to some of the wild things of the mountains.
From the southern shore of the lake Thornton stared across the little
body of water trying to make out a light to tell him that Clayton was
expecting him. But there was no fire, and the stars, reflecting
themselves in the natural mirror, failed to show him so much as the
outline of the lean-to in the shadows of the cliffs. He turned down into
the trail which ran about the shore, passed around the western end of
the lake, and riding slowly, his eyes ever watchful about him as was the
man's habit, he came at last to the deserted "shack."